Crowd-sourcing software testing company uTest nabs $17M

Software testing service, uTest announced Monday a Series D round of funding of $17 million, in a round led by QuestMark Partners.

Boston-based uTest provides testing of software throughout its lifecycle (from security to usability to crowd-sourcing tests) has collected more than $37 million in funding to date -- $30 million of which was acquired in the last 15 months.

The four-year-old company has had various investors since its inception, including rounds with support from Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital.

The company intends to use this capital to launch new tools to help developers, and to open more offices in in major cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas.

So far, uTest has built a software testing community of more than 45,000 testers in 180 countries so that clients can challenge their products on “real devices under real-world condition."

Such customer includes global Internet brands such as Google, Microsoft, Skype, Groupon andAOL.

With software being launched by thousands of brands each week and so many devices and interfaces that software can be translated to, companies often look outside their company to help test the product to catch bugs and poor user experiences.

UTest states the it has seen year-over-year growth near 250% for the past three years. In fact, uTest has seen that in the past year, more than $75 million have been invested in similar crowd-driven firms and continues to attract the attention of investors as well as customers looking to assure their products have been thoroughly tested prior to release on the competitive marketplace. One of the uTest competitors includes a one-year-old startup called 99Tests.

Crowd-sourcing as a method of testing has grown in popularity because it puts Web browser software and other interfaces to a test that replicates a world-wide launch so that developers can see how their product works at different network speed, varying hardware and operating systems and by users of varying computer competence.

UTest has seen the number of apps released each quarter skyrocket since the third quarter of 2010, from fewer than 100 mobile apps and fewer than 400 Web apps to the fourth quarter results of more than 700 mobile apps and more than 900 Web apps.

As the company has gained more business, it has recorded that it identified and notified companies of more than 75,000 bugs and security vulnerabilities in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone.

In the coming months, uTest has hopes to create more tools for developers to test Web and mobile apps with better accuracy as well as recruit more specialized testers to add to its community -- specifically linguists, performance engineers and more security experts.